It’s About Fit: Comprehensive College Counseling at Lovett

Just last weekend, Lovett graduated the class of 2023, one of the most joyous and meaningful ceremonies held on the riverbank each year. Last Saturday's festivities celebrated this most recent group of grads as they head off to 54 different institutions across 20 states, the District of Columbia, and even abroad. Almost 79% of our seniors have selected colleges out of state, and 13 Lovett student athletes will compete at the collegiate level next year. What can you and your child expect as you begin to navigate a college search process of your own? Let's spend some time examining how our college counseling team cultivates strong relationships with college partners domestically and abroad. This is Living Lovett, stories from the riverbank. I'm Jessica Sant, Chief Engagement Officer at the Lovett School. On the season three finale of Living Lovett, you'll be introduced to a group of six college admission deans who have agreed to serve multi-year terms as a part of Lovett's College Admission Summit. A yearly meeting, Lovett's College Counseling Team strategically invites admission deans and directors from a wide range of universities to visit with students, parents, faculty, and even trustees. Listen carefully as each of them share perspective on the value of the Lovett experience for our kids, the partnership they enjoy with our school, and many of their views on the future of college admission. This exceptional event is an aspect of Lovett's comprehensive college counseling program that strives to set students up for post-secondary success. As we say in the college admission world, there are two sides to the college admission desk. Before we hear from our college admission deans, here's a peek at Lovett's side of the process. While all of the credit for the accomplishments of our 2023 grads is owed to them, behind the scenes they were supported by our community, their families, our faculty, and also of course a team of Lovett College counselors. That support translates into a well-informed and proactive college counseling experience that begins in the 10th grade. It's worth mentioning that next year we'll have six full-time college counselors in our upper school, we'll be available to students all year long including summers. We'll also be piloting a remote position that will focus specifically on essay prep and interview practice. With this unprecedented level of support, it's safe to say Lovett's college counseling office is one of the most robust in Metro Atlanta. Now that you've heard from Lovett, let's turn to the other side of the admission desk and get perspective of our six admission deans. My name is Nate Crozier. I work for the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, and I am the Assistant Vice President of Admission and Marketing. Jeff Galant, Boston College, Associate Director of Undergraduate Admission, Director of Transfer Admission. My name is Calvin Wise III. I work at Johns Hopkins University and I'm our Director of Recruitment. Mary Tipton-Willy. I'm the Senior Associate Director of Undergraduate Admission at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia. My name is Eric Alstrand. I serve as Associate Director of Admission at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. And in a few minutes, we'll hear from Melissa Klein, Director of Admissions at Fermi University, and Lovett Alumna. The college admission experience can feel overwhelming. So many requirements, letters, transcripts, essays. It may feel like this exercise turns students from human beings into a checklist. Jeff Galant of Boston College describes a mindset that serves him and his fellow reviewers as well as they assess applications. Sure. I think you have an appreciation for all that goes into that application that's in front of you. Think about all the decisions and all that application represents. And I think at Stonehill and at Boston College for a long time, there's always the utmost respect on this side for what we ask of students and families and the ways that we ask them to put themselves out there in their applications and all the time and the effort and the support they get from their community at great schools like Lovett Alumna, the people that are part of that application. I think one, there's the utmost respect for students in that. And then also trying to, again, we're not trying to not admit students. You want to make every effort to admit students. And so you sort of start a review of an application with that mindset. And why do why do why could we admit the student? Exactly. Yeah. And so if there are sort of deficiencies in that application or weaknesses, because we're all human, we all strengths and we all have weaknesses. And yeah, either Gotham students don't get to see the application the way we see it and all the parts together. And they really do highlight everyone's strengths and everyone's weaknesses. But like, what are some explanations for those perceived weaknesses? And then I think just the excitement we get from you, obviously the essays and the personal, yeah, anytime we can read a student's writing, that's a unique part of the application. You really get excited because then then you start to envision that student and that person contributing to your community in a meaningful way. And either you just get excited for the students that are terrific fits for Boston College while you're reviewing applications. Listen to the numbers of applications these officers are encountering. Nate Crozier shares the numbers of first year applications that University of Miami receives. How many total applications did the University of Miami receive this year? 50,000-ish, 50,100 give or take. How many seats are in your incoming first year class? Well, for fall 2023, we would like to enroll 2,250. The example at UM is typical of selective colleges. While each institution has a different number of applicants, the growing volume of applications and limited number of open freshman seats can be seen at many schools. Success is a major theme that's running throughout these conversations. Everyone wants students to be successful ultimately. Listen to some of our admissions summit guests describe the interplay between assessing who the student is, where they're going, as well as the institutional needs of individual campuses. Right. I think that is a piece that we talk about a lot is we are looking to meet the student where they are. We're looking to meet their entire story. It's why we ask maybe more essay questions and students would love to answer. But asking those questions, you're really hearing from them and the members of their community, their school community, their broader community, who they are. And being able to start painting them into the broader picture of Dartmouth, that's what we're aiming to do. At the end of the day, we are faced with a numbers problem. We don't have enough eds on our campus to admit all of the students we'd want to admit. If we admitted all of those students, they'd start rolling costs into every admission officer's office. But we meet those students and start to construct a group of students we're going to learn from each other, that element, social engineering, those communities that are going to learn from each other, that are going to challenge each other. And know that those conversations that 2am on the hall are just as important as the conversation they're going to have in class the next day. Looking for students who are going to be willing to bring their stories to campus and are interested in hearing the stories of others. And it starts with us authentically and open-mindedly meeting students and hearing their stories. I think that calling it a cultural matchmaker is kind of that idea of fit in both sides of that equation. College counselors helping students assess fit, of course the student self-assessing their fit at that institution. But we're also trying to get a sense of what the fit at an orange institution would look like for that student. When they get the application, they're going through, for us we have three pillars of our application review that is academic character impact initiative in overall match to the institution. And so we pull evidence out of the application that matches with those pieces. And I think of our readers as researchers and they're looking through all letters of recommendation and essays and transcripts and activities list all those different pieces to pull out those different aspects of the evidence that match the things that we're looking for. We document that and then we have robust conversations as we go through committee. We are in the middle of regular decision committee right now, so that's very fresh and unfortunately we don't have enough seats for all the competitive students that apply. It's probably the hardest part of my job. What helps me sleep at night is I try to focus on the students that we can admit and not the ones that we can't admit and just how truly special the incoming classes each year. And I've been in this profession long enough to know even the students that we do not admit they go off to do amazing things. So I think starting with the environments that you thrive, what type of support, it's very hard for students. Think about what they want to get out of college because they haven't been to college yet. So they don't really have too much of an experience to go off of. I think you can look at your high school experience and you see your family's chose to go to love it. Something brought them there. I hope that they are enjoying their experience. So start there, unpack that, think about what you want, what you have gotten out of that and what you enjoy. And maybe there's something that you want to change. And sometimes what you want to change or I talk about this when students visit a campus you may visit a campus and you don't even want to get out the car. And you're like, I this is not for me. I happened to meet my houses in some colleges and we would drive three hours and I'm like, nah, this isn't it. When dad was like, but we drove three hours. So get out of the car. But that is a productive experience as well. And I think instead of, you can, I'll give you your moment of frustration, but then take a step back, breathe and then ask the questions. But what about it? Is it the location? You know, is it the people? Is it the surrounding community? Talk to me more. I think for students, the most important aspect of this process, and I would say, I've seen a lot of students go through college and be ultimately successful. And one thing they have in common is that they use their words. They have strong communication skills. But when you start to talk about a place like Georgia Tech or anyone that has any kind of selectivity in their process, what an institution is trying to do as a vision for what they want their university to be has a huge role in what we're doing on the admissions side. The example I use often at Georgia Tech that really is very relevant. We have now 37 majors. We can easily admit our entire first year class into one a couple of times over. There's actually like a few of the handful of those where we could do that. Well, that's, that's not going to be good for our campus. And so we think a lot about students' academic interests and how their high school background is matching up to those as we're trying to make decisions. That's a good example of something that we would talk a lot about in committee. But that initial review is simply just, who's the student? What do they have to bring to campus? How are they doing academically? And then in committee, we're starting to think a lot more about how, what has Georgia Tech, big Georgia Tech, ask us in the admission office to do. How does the fact that Georgia Tech is a public institution factor into how you guys make decisions? Does it matter at all? Is it a part of the conversation in terms of institutional priorities? Absolutely. All the time, we have a responsibility that represent the entire state of Georgia. And we are an incredibly diverse state in terms of schools and opportunities in a school and in community for students. And it just really looks different, right? Somebody in my office once said something about a little rural student, students that live in a rural area don't have the same opportunity. I'm like, well, well, I've been repping a rural area. Actually, if lots of opportunities, they just look different than perhaps a student that lives in Metro LMS. We absolutely spend a lot of time thinking about how we are helping us. Frankly, this is not really an issue for a love-it family to see how they could fit at Georgia Tech, right? Like they've already figured that out once a student is a bye to us, lots of students from love-it at 10. There's a lot of alumni in your community. But there are pockets in the Metro area and pockets in the state where students don't see a path to Georgia Tech. They don't look around their community and see alumni necessarily, or maybe only one. And so that's absolutely a challenge for us and something that we spend a lot of time talking about. It's also really important for students that come to Georgia Tech from love-it to learn from a student that grew up at Glenwood, Georgia. I met a student from there this weekend. So I think that's really important. They bring a perspective to Georgia Tech and to students from love-it that probably haven't really been exposed that much to it. Sure. That was Eric Allstrand at Dartmouth, Calvin Wise at Johns Hopkins and Mary Tipton-Wully at Georgia Tech. This group of admission pros not only approached their work as experts in their field, but also some of them as parents. They've given lots of thought to how they might support a system and a process they'd want their own children to experience as well. Nate Crozier describes what he'd want for his own daughter. You're a parent. How many kids do you have? Just one. She did. She turned 11 last week. She turned 11 next week. So no last week. Oh, last week. Well, happy birthday. When she enters this journey of the college application process, what advice do you hope she's getting? Not necessarily from you, but from her teachers or counselors, the adults in her school community to help her manage that process. That's such a great question. It's interesting because she's graduating elementary school in a matter of a few weeks. That transition point from elementary to middle, and there's a couple of different options. Really where I've centered my thinking and encouraged her to think about, and granted, she's 11. To truly wrap her head around it the way that a 16, 17, or 18-year-old code is a bit different. But getting her familiar with thinking about, what gets you really jazzed outside of the classroom? What type of environment do you want to be in? Really thinking about the whole student. She'll be fine academically. I'm not as concerned or even thinking about that. To me, it's the emotional, mental, and social health that is super important to me as a parent. When she gets to the age where she's considering post-secondary institutions, to me, it matters how you're learning. What environment are you going to thrive in as a student? Not necessarily to get the A, but to ask questions about whatever it is that you're learning, how you think about things critically, analytically, and then beyond how you think, what support does the campus community offer to help you thrive? Both in how you think, maybe through research, through study abroad, those experiential opportunities, and then also the networking, the connection points, the engagement that are so important to continue to develop the whole student, the whole person, the whole professional. Where I would start is, ultimately, there's no kind of one place. The idea that a student would only thrive at one university or one college, which is a different way of thinking. Certainly, I understand the idea that students would begin shaping their list and end up falling in love with one place. But even beyond that, at the end of the day, there's so many great institutions across the country. You define great subjectively. Again, to me, when I think of best institutions, it's the institutions that get you to challenge your conventional way of thinking, or challenge the status quo, and get you asking questions about things that you see in everyday life, or that you come across in the lab or the classroom. There are so many institutions that do that extremely well. Gravitating towards such a really small set from the beginning, I think, is something where cast a broad net and embrace what the process is ultimately about. That is, the student in self-discovery. What type of learner is the student? What type of environment would they ultimately thrive? How do they want to push themselves in ways that maybe they didn't consider even a year earlier? I think one thing coming into the process is to be totally open-minded and okay with it being a self-discovery process. By now, you've heard more about Levitt's college counseling philosophy, and you've also heard directly from higher education pros. But you also might be wondering what this group thinks about the Levitt community. First and foremost, the admissions process is an academic competition. So I think the rigor of love it is important. I hope it translates to college options that students are happy with at the end because this is not a perfect process. I don't know if that always will happen to 100% satisfaction, but at the very least, I feel like Levitt's students are well prepared to handle the rigor of college. That's a really good feeling in the fall semester of your freshman year when it's not such a tidal wave that might be some other members of that first couple college seminars. You feel good. You feel like you can handle it. That's a good spot to be in. But I think one thing that's always made Levitt's students a good fit for Boston College and other schools as well is just the holistic nature of the education. It's clear that your community cares about developing your students in many ways. Certainly academic intellectually, but also personally and from a character standpoint and leadership or their gifts might be from a personal standpoint, trying to make sure that development, significant development happens during their time. At Levitt and that connects well to a school like Boston College where we are a Jesuit Catholic we have models like men and women for others and educating the whole person and that's part of our institutional mission. It makes it a good fit. I know the counselors love it very well, and so I could definitely speak to this. The first thing that comes to mind is just the deep knowledge of the work, highly experienced as the counselors have been working in this space for a long period of time and on both sides of the desk having experience in admissions and having that insight as well as having that experience on the high school side itself. A lot of when I visit schools across the country, there's a lot of counseling departments that don't have the college counseling background experience. It is a competency. It is a knowledge that you kind of have to work towards an experience to have. You all are very fortunate to have a college counseling office that has that deep knowledge of that as well as a lot of the counselors are leaders in our profession overseeing associations, working a lot of different spaces. Those in the profession have seen the counselors that love it as leaders in the profession and thought leaders around the work. You're really fortunate in regard to be able to have counselors from that perspective. They're very reasonable and understanding. You have, I love it, incredible college counselors who are absolute experts because they've won been on both sides of this process via from college counseling perspective or the college admissions perspective. But it's also a group of people that we trust when there is point of tension or there is a question about a oftentimes complicated process. Focusing the college counseling office will pick up the phone and NEDA will pick up the phone and call us and ask us a question because she knows who we are. There's a flip side of it that we trust the college counselors with whom we work. We know that they are giving ethically-sound advice, that they are maintaining the student's voice and putting their success front and center. That was Jeff Gallant at Boston College, Calvin Wise at Johns Hopkins and Eric Allstrand at Dartmouth. We have a very special insight to share with you on this episode. Melissa Klein is a love it alum and also serves as director of admission at Furman University. Melissa knows firsthand how community is fostered at love it and how that relates to life on a college campus. What I think our families would be interested to know is that so you are a love it alum, you are also the director of admission at Furman and for many many years you were our admission representative and the beauty of that in this case, a very unique case, is that you probably know this school better than any other school you ever visited because it's your home too. Having visited here many times since you were a student here, what do you think has stayed the same and what do you think has changed? You know I think the words that come to mind in terms of what has stayed the same is community. I think certainly there are some faculty members who are still there from when I was a student. I think how the faculty to student engagement is the same. I think happy, I think support those are words that I would have experienced as a student and my engagement with families over the years, love its admissions rep and then being on the admissions summit, I think those are words that still resonate in terms of that kind of the common theme from my own experience to what I see with students. I think in terms of what's changed I would say in open-mindedness I would say greater respect for different backgrounds and experiences and where students are coming from. I think that's been something as a love at alumna and watching that from the alumni experience and seeing how that has shifted and changed has been something I've really appreciated. When you think about the skill and types of experiences that love it is cultivating in our kids, what do you see as outcomes from this community and also how does that translate into success for life on a college campus? Sure, maybe I'm somewhat uniquely positioned having graduated from LVEB but I also graduated from Fermond. Speaking from position in this office, you know in our institution we want to make sure that our students who are coming into our community have a respect for community and want to engage in that way whether it's engaging on our campus or engaging in the local community we want to make sure that our students are prepared to continue developing the whole individual and I think that's something that love it does really well is focusing on developing the whole individual mind, body, spirit a little bit of everything and I think that's something that we see in love at students and something that the community fosters whether it is through engagement in the local Atlanta community or engagement on love it's campus. I think that those are important factors that we would hope to see and the students set matriculated our institution going to school day in and day out that you want to be there that you want to be a part of that community and I think that's something that I certainly get a sense for love at students that they do want to be a part of that community and be connected to one another and those are those are characteristics that we would value within our own school school community here at Fermond. We've also spent some time talking just about the challenges of this industry especially today the climate that we are all working in as it relates to acceptance rates and application volume and the perceptions of how challenging it is to even get into a college, any college and I say perceptions intentionally because it's not always true that it feels impossible to get in but that could be what's being messaged. What are some of those challenges on your side like when you think about the worries you might have about your own team and your own office and how you do your work? What are what's the top one, two or three concerns? Sure I mean in a distance of working with prospective students I oversee our admissions counseling team which typically will have between 12 to 13 individuals on our staff. We have seen as many other institutions that continue to application growth over the past two to three years. I think something that we're always cognizant of is the idea of helping our staff balance the needs of increasing application volume and the need to be intentional and holistic and thorough in our review but recognizing that our team isn't growing at that same rate the pressures to be thorough be intentional be personal and how we treat this process and keep it student-centered while also recognizing a very real need to help them balance the work. That is an ongoing struggle. I think one thing that we've tried to be really intentional about this year certainly in the past couple of years as well is starting our review season and frequent reminders throughout the review season that what we're doing is students centered that at the end of the day we are making decisions that are going to impact a student's trajectory and whether that decision as that student receives it offer a admission from ferment or they don't we don't take that lightly our conversations are always on seeing who that student is individually I think it's all too easy to look at a transcript and say this is who the student is on paper but that is not who that student is at their core so I think I think it's important as much as possible in college admissions and education that we stay student-centered you know we talked about development of the whole individual the byproduct of going to college should be finding a place that's going to help you continue down that path of self-discovery of reflection but to your point it's that's not the end it's identifying a purposeful life a meaningful life happiness success however we want to define that and the definition of what's a best college or a good college that's also subjective because what's best and good and best and good's like the individual do you feel I love it helped you get to that point in your life I do yeah I do you know I had some some great college options I mean I knew for one was a tough choice for me and I think that I had an incredible college counselor who helped me through that an incredible community I think back to the resources that I had you know it's when you're in the moment you don't realize how incredible the experience is experience is and then you look back on it and think oh my gosh what did I have access to I went I traveled to Italy with my classmates did cruel competitions musicals had incredible relationships with faculty members who followed me through my first and second you're in college checking in on me saying how I was doing and I know that so many of my classmates at Furman didn't have that same sort of follow-through okay here it is the last question and you're the only one that gets it on this episode because you are our alum so you're uniquely qualified to answer the question what does living love it mean to you I think living love it means living life of purpose living life respectful of community respect for yourself I think living a life of continual development of yourself I mean we referenced earlier mind body spirit I think back of my time at love it from kindergarten all the way through graduating as a high school senior and recognize the development of the whole self I may not have noted that in the moment as it was happening but I think about entering a college campus prepared to engage in small classroom discussions engage in a community with individuals from all over the globe I think prepared to engage in lifelong dialogue with individuals who are different than myself respect for my community respect for myself just a true respect for the whole individual thanks to eric austrand melissa klein nate crosier jeff gallant calvin wise and mary tipton woolly for being on the season three finale of living love it today you can find living love it on apple podcast spotify or your favorite podcast app connect to the love at school on facebook twitter and instagram all things love at school may be found on our school website love it dot org i'm jessica sant and until next season i hope you've enjoyed this story from the riverbank . .